The Swerve

No, my point isn't about 3 degrees of warming - I agree that's possible. My point is that 3 degrees of warming will not cause civilization to end, still less human life.

This seems like a general argument that "unexpected bad things might happen". I agree, sure - but this argument applies equally to, for example, alien invasions or grey goo. The question I'm addressing is whether global warming will cause civilization to collapse or humans to go extinct. I claim no serious climate scientist thinks that.

To avoid ecological disaster, we need to slam on the brakes, not merely pump them.

> Once the marginal productivity of physical capital is below the real interest rate people will abandon production even if there is a shortage of products and people are starving on the street.

Given the profit margin on farming is something like 10%, and assuming the average annual purchasing power appreciation of our hypothetical global currency of fixed supply equals the Fed’s inflation target of 2% plus 0.25% GDP growth, how do we arrive at people “starving on the street”?

> If you want to discourage consumption you should introduce consumption taxes for natural resources, co2 and other forms of pollution

Surely the level of taxation necessary to curb industrial and retail usage of fossil fuels to the same extent of global deflationary economics would make the taxation measures politically infeasible. The tax policy would need to result in unthinkably high prices to create the drastic changes necessary. Deflation OTOH would lead to a decline in capital investment, employment, and spending without requiring any level of forcible compulsion.

A global currency of fixed supply would realistically deliver a sufficiently powerful financial incentive to galvanize widespread, voluntary adoption of ecologically sustainable consumer behaviour and business practices.

> by maintaining full employment

Particularly with the rise of automation and AI, is maintaining full employment really an achievable goal? We desperately need a way for the majority of humans to subsist without working bullshit jobs [1].

> hence the need to force ever greater quantities of money into the economy to keep it alive

We’re facing ecological collapse precisely because humanity has chased infinite growth.

[1]: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

An author I discovered only in the past decade, though he's been active since the 1970s, is William Ophuls.

He was amongst the first to write of the political dimension of addressing global catastrophic risks. Initially, that was largely focused on the concept of resource limits. Global warming isn't unrelated, though it's a sink limit: boundaries on the ability of the environment to absorb the consequences of human activity without making that human activity itself untenable.

What Ophuls realised, and what I'm increasingly convinced of, is that it's not the technical element, but rather the political, social, cultural, and economic (commerce, finance, trade, power) aspects which will prove the most challenging. And he seems to have been correct.

I strongly recommend all his work, though Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (first published in 1977, revised ~1994) and Plato's Revenge (2011) are probably the best starting points.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...

https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...

https://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-th...

Also available via Archive Org:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=william%20ophuls

Ophuls has a website with more recent writings:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190311104851/https://ophuls.or...

As he's on in years, I've looked for others who are carrying on his tradition. Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon is referenced by Ophuls several times and seems closest:

https://homerdixon.com/

"Let's roll" is an allusion to a self-sacrifice made on the moring of 11 September 2001, in which a group of unorganised civilians aboard United Airlines flight 93 stormed the cockpit within which armed hijackers were piloting the aircraft toward Washington, DC, having already killed the flight crew and several passengers. The group stormed the cockpit and overwhelmed the hijackers, crashing the aircraft into the ground in rural Pennsylvania. All 44 on board were killed, either in the crash or earlier by the hijackers. "Let's roll" were the last words uttered by passenger Todd Beamer via phone before the passengers swerved the bus, in this case, an aircraft.[1]

The plane's likely target, the US Capitol or the White House, were saved.

What "let's roll" resolves to is principled sacrifice for the greater goood.

There is no Pareto-optimal solution. That is, there is no action which causes no harm, or benefits all.

There are less pessimal solutions. There are courses of action which minimise net harm, or perhaps more significantly and apporpriately, maximise long-term survival, resilience, and net quality of life for many future generations.

We're having this discussion in the immediate context of a global pandemic whose reported deaths exceed six million souls with estimates of actual deaths from 15--26 million[2], in which both individuals and political leaders at city, state, and national levels refused to take or implement basic measures such as social distancing, masking mandates, and vaccine requirements, on the basis of claimed rights to attend spring break parties, "personal freedoms", pecuniary concerns (most of which appear to have been far more severely impacted by measures taken in their name), and similar short-sighted, selfish, and straight-up counterfactual bases.

Cory, I, and numerous others aren't saying there's a fairytale ending to this. There are simply less horrific variants of hell.

I've been reading Kim Staley Robinson's fiction book Ministry for the Future. Among the criticisms I've seen of it is Francis Fukuyama's, who finds the book unrealistic in that KSR seems to assume that everything goes right. Mind that "going right" includes mass terrorist response that destroys tens of thousands of commercial jetliners in flight and heatwaves killing tens of millions across South Asia.

Fukuyama is right in one regard, though. KSR is showing us what a best case (or close to it) scenario might look like. It is an optimistic book.

And it's still got some pretty awful parts.

The line we'll likely track will be far south of Robinson's plot. But the line we follow doing nothing is far further south still.

Or to quote another climate realist: Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

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Notes:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...